'Hispanchista'! The new insult that is fracturing the Spanish far right

BarcelonaSantiago Abascal was the first to react with a tweet to the announcement of the agreement to regularize half a million undocumented immigrants. "500,000 illegals! The tyrant Sánchez hates the Spanish people. He wants to replace them. That's why he intends to promote a pull factor by decree, to accelerate the invasion. We must stop him. Repatriations, deportations, and re-emigration." From that moment on, Abascal and the entire party took to social media to lead the opposition to the measure, facing a hesitant People's Party (PP) with little credibility on this issue, given that José María Aznar had carried out two mass regularizations. Abascal, who is currently immersed in the Aragon campaign, quickly adapted his message. While until that day the main slogan was "Corruption kills," in reference to the Adamuz accident, on Tuesday he added the coda, "And the invasion, too."

The Popular Party also made a textbook error when they publicly stated that the measure "benefited Vox," prompting a bombastic response from Abascal: "Regularization doesn't benefit Vox, it harms all of Spain." However, the move hasn't worked out entirely smoothly for the party. On the same day as the agreement, Funcas published a report The report estimated that there are 800,000 undocumented immigrants in Spain and indicated that 90% of them come from the Americas. Therefore, the extraordinary regularization would primarily affect people of South American origin. And here Vox has a problem: its nostalgic Spanish nationalism, rooted in the imperial past, leads it to consider Latin Americans as brothers and sisters, not as foreigners. This Hispanophilia is also embraced by the People's Party (PP) and even Alvise Pérez, and it draws from the historical doctrine of the Falange, expressed by its ideologue Ramiro de Ledesma in the slogan "We are them and they will always be us," which Isabel Díaz Ayuso recently adapted with the phrase "..." uttered during the Hispanic Day festival that her government organized in October.

Against the 'panchitos'

But, of course, the growing racism in Spanish society is also turning against South American immigration, and from even more far-right and white supremacist sectors a neologism is being used to designate this drift of parties like the PP and Vox: Hispanista mixture ofHispanic and panchitowhich is the pejorative and racist way of referring to the non-white South American population, and which seeks to delve into the contradiction of being against immigration but at the same time opening the doors to everyone who comes from some corner of the Hispanic world and speaks Spanish, whatever their skin color may be.

Interestingly, the rejection of the Hispanic American community is especially pronounced in the Community of Madrid, which has the largest concentration of people of this origin. The contradiction plaguing Vox is that whenever a crime is committed by a North African, they are quick to denounce it on social media, but they are less vocal when it comes to crimes committed by Latin gangs, such as the Trinitarios or DDP, which originated in the Dominican Republic but admit members from other South American countries.

Difference with Aliança Catalana

This is a differentiating fact of the Spanish far right compared to the European one (where there is no feeling of brotherhood with the former colonies and ethnic supremacism prevails) and also compared to the Catalan one of Aliança Catalana, which despite having a basically Islamophobic discourse does not make distinctions between immigrants and that gives it an obvious competitive advantage.

Ultimately, the Spanish far right must resolve a fundamental question: "What does it mean to be Spanish?" And even more fundamentally, "What is Spain?" Is Spain the territory defined by the 1978 Constitution, or is it more of an idea centered around the concept of Hispanicity and a language spoken by 500 million people? Would Vox veto the regularization of the "Latin American brothers and sisters" who are in Spain without papers and who consider it their "homeland"?motherlandDoes this suggest that it could be the major debate facing the Spanish far right and that it could cause an internal split in the future?